Stage One of Achieving Meaningful Use

The goal of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC)  is for each person to have an electronic health record (EHR) by 2014.  The ONC has also established the goal of a nationwide infrastructure that would support individual EHRs.  This is obviously a lofty goal.  In order to make it more manageable, the development, implementation, and adoption goals have been spread out over three stages.  The first stage of meaningful use must be achieved and reportable to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) by 2011.  For hospitals to take full advantage of incentive payment progrrams, they must demonstrate stage one meaningful use criteria beginning January 1, 2011.     The sooner stage one and then subsequent stages are met, the more financial incentives the hospital will receive, as you can see from the chart below.

Stage one requires that hospitals meet 20 of 25 objectives established by CMS. Each objective has a specific measure that has to be met.  Some objectives need to meet a certain percentage of use and others only need to be available for use. CMS will audit these objectives to determine the amount of money each eligible provider and eligible hospital.

Another imporatnt piece of meaningful use is being able to speak the language.  The language of informatics and information technology has almost as many acronyms as nursing.  To truly understand the language and requirements of meaningful use you must know the meanings of the alphabet soup that is splattered throughout the technical writing.

The following is another simple video relating meaningful use to tennis.